Remember when we used to get by on positive reinforcements? Long before the threat of bad grades loomed over our written work, way back when we had just learned to put pencil to paper pointy-side-down, we expressed ourselves to garner praise or stickers or both from our teachers and parents. We put words in front of other words because hey, we finally could, and everyone witness to our newfound potential for syntactical creation thought it was pretty darn neat. We wrote for happy feelings, seeking reward instead of fearing punishment. 

Then adulthood happened, and those of us who kept building word chains did so thanks to negative reinforcement. But wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to that sticker-seeking mentality? Well, thanks to the internet, we can. With kittens.

We've seen writer motivation widgets based on negative reinforcement. They're quite effective. Tools like Write Or Die threaten the user with menacing colors and unpleasant sounds if they don't keep typing away toward a word goal. It sure helps to get the adrenaline running and it's extremely useful for feats like NaNoWriMo, where the point is more to dump out as many sentences as possible in a very small amount of time. But what about situations where time pressure is actually a detriment to content quality? When you're writing a research paper about the ancient Babylonians, you don't want to have your work session interrupted by mechanical threats every time you check a fact. So you use Written Kitten--a tool that lets you keep track of your word count in real time and rewards you when you achieve certain goals, like hitting 200, 500, or 1000 words, with a picture of an adorable kitten.

The app sources its imagery from Flickr, where thousands of photographically-inclined kitten owners upload shots of their pets every day. It randomly picks "interesting" photos tagged with "kitten" and "cute", then pops one up for you whenever you hit that goal you set for yourself. It'll even save your work for you in case you accidentally close the wrong tab before copying your fresh text into a word processor. Much friendlier than its more barbaric cousin, who insists on layering odd formatting onto my text whenever I copy it out of my workspace.

What do you think, writers? Does cuteness motivate you, or do you need to grant more tangible rewards for yourself--like granting yourself another cup of coffee after you churn out a few hundred words? Or are you the type who can only get things done under the threat of the digital whip? Me, I'm beginning to think I'm more of the kitten type.